From 1 to 6 of July the Millenium Song Festival will gather approximately forty thousand performers to events in Vilnius and Kaunas. The Festival will start with a cycle of professional art projects, which will symbolically recreate the way of Lithuania running from ancient Baltic to contemporary Western cultures.
The Folklore Day will be dedicated to versatile semantics of the Earth. The Ensembles Night and the Dance Day will reflect the flow of cyclical and historical time. New programmes of the Schoolchildren Day, modernized folklore, theatre and others will be presented.
The main accent of the Festival is the Song Day. 18 thousand singers will perform most beautiful songs of the previous Song Festivals and new pieces dedicated to the Millennium of Lithuania on an outdoor stage in Vingis Park designed especially for the Song Day.
Lithuania is the land of songs - having retained the name since olden ti mes. First chronicles that had not mentioned the name of Lithuania, yet - the Baltic tribes, and historical sources of the 19 -20th centuries, foreign travelers and nationals – pillars of the renascent national movement – had noted the special songfulness of the Lithuanian nation and the beauty of a folk song that used to accompany people throughout their entire life.
It is no wonder we preserve the tradition of the Song Festival. The first Song Festival was held in 1924, in Kaunas, assembling approximately three thousand participants and ten thousand spectators. In 85 years it grew up into an impressive cultural movement.
The Lithuanian Song Festival is organized every four years. The fundamental parts of the programme are - the Folklore Day, the Ensembles Night, the Dance Day and the Song Day, drawing up over fifteen thousand singers, performing harmonizations of folk songs, vocal music pieces both of the golden fund of the Lithuanian professional music and those by contemporary authors.
A particularity of the day is a capella singing. The programme of the Song Festival is surrounded by additional events such as the folk art exhibition, the Afternoon of the national instrument Kanklės, brass orchestra concerts and parades, amateur theatre performances, professional art events, processions of participants of the Festival. The programme is annually renovated.
In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of the Song and Dance Festivals of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as a value of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
The Song of the Centuries (July 1 - 5, 2009) is the 18th Song Festival. This is an exceptional event, selected as the main accent of the programme of the Commemoration of the Millennium of Lithuania for being the most universal manifestation of the national culture.
